Pimped Beginning characters, And the players addicted to them.... Options

[Glyph]

L.D., Shockwave, it's not a matter of min-maxing being more or less "important" than a background - it's a matter of effort being put into character creation tending to make people identify more with their characters. But number-crunching and good backgrounds are not mutually incompatible. Heck, I bet you guys do more number-crunching, trying to get the character that your background envisions, than some munchkins do. It's the effort spent on the character that encourages the player to roleplay the character well.

I agree that background is more important than the raw numbers, and you know that the technique of min-maxing is being carried too far when your background starts sounding cobbled-together or contrived, more of a way to explain how you got your stats than a description of an actual fictional person. But some level of min-maxing is needed, because Shadowrun is a team game, where you are playing someone who could plausibly be accepted as an asset by a group of professional criminals.

There are a lot of self-professed "roleplayers" who don't pay enough attention to making a useful character, and wind up feeling useless for half of the game. Because a lot of the game does come down to dice rolls, which both add a random element to the game and simulate usage of skills. It doesn't matter how well-written your background is; if you don't have decent skills and abilities, you will be ineffective.

[L.D]

@Glyph
I realise that, but I was responding to

[Shockwave_IIc]

Thanks L.D for answering for me and proberbly better then i could.

[L.D]

You're welcome. :)

[toturi]

[TinkerGnome]

Wow, this thread is still taking on water. The truth of it is that any player who focuses on either roleplaying or rollplaying to the exclusion of the other is a bad player. The former used to crop up in L5R all the time, where you'd get someone who could run verbal rings around a player with twice the social skills and come out on top. The key to keeping this behavior in check, according to AEG, at least, was to always call for rolls but provide modifiers based on the quality of the roleplaying.

In sr terms, Joe and Bob are negotiating with two identical fixers in two identical warehouses for two identical items. Joe has negotiations 2 but is a phenomenal roleplayer. Bob is a moderately bad roleplayer and has negotiations 6.

The TN to get the item is 5. Joe does a great job of talking the fixer up, and laying out a good case for why he should get the item. His arguments are sound, logical, and make it look like the deal of a lifetime. Bob manages to mumbles something about really needing the item and offering a price.

When it comes time to roll the dice, the GM awards Joe a -1 to his TN because of his roleplaying and has him roll against TN 4. Bob barely muddled through (but he tried) so his TN is still a 5. Joe gets 1 success and Bob gets 2.

Does that mean Bob is a better player? No. He barely muddled through a conversation with an NPC. Is Joe a good player? No, he's playing a character who should obviously have a high negotiations and he didn't buy the proper skill level. Not only that, Joe is actually not as good a roleplayer he things, since he wasn't playing the character with reguards to his stats (he probably only glanced at the sheet once before the game started, so confident was he in his ability to "roleplay" through the game).

Okay, these are contrived examples. A truely good roleplayer is also someone who spends time with the numbers of his character. He may not spend hours starting at his list of cyber deciding how to eek in another .01 essence worth of gear, but he does spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of gear his character would own and use. He crunches numbers, but not for the sake of crunching numbers.

Bah, this was a long post that went nowhere useful ;)

[L.D]

[TinkerGnome]

Also, I forgot to mention BtDS (Bob the Destroyer Syndrome). Basicly, it's named after a guy I used to game with. He played many different characters, but they were all Bob the Destroyer. If you shot down a character, he'd tweak it a little and come back with Bob the Destroyer Mk 15. He spent a lot of time on number crunching and his characters, but they clearly weren't something he was invested in.

[Sphynx]

[toturi]

LD: The implication of your argument was thus given the example you have given.

TinkerGnome: Sure he was interested. He was interested in building and playing a Destroyer character, and he was persistent enough to do it over and over again! It was you and perhaps the people you gamed with that didn't realised that. He evidently wanted a character that ownz the opposition, your GM was stupid enough not to realise that.

[TinkerGnome]

Actually, Sphynx, yeah. WW's Exalted has something called stunt dice. If you describe your actions during combat and GM and other PCs think "Wow, that's just so cool", you get extra dice. In SR, it's usually an extra point of karma pool for the encounter or possible an extra die on the roll. Saying "I'm going to put six dice of combat pool into this!" doesn't add anything to the enjoyment of game for the group as a whole (in most groups, at least), whereas someone adding a vivid mental image does. [edit] The problem in L5R is that you had two extreems on the player spectrum. The kind that would roleplay straight through a social situation and try to avoid rolling at all, and those who would say "I want to get him to do x" and ask for a TN to roll against. The solution was to always call for a roll but let the quality of acting influence the TN. This let Joe and Bob be on more equal footing since, otherwise, Joe the Roleplayer would own Bob in a samurai game. [/edit]

I remember one game where we, for some unknown reason, were sneaking into Bug City via nightgliders. I was an adept with a dikoted katana (these were premades) and we were being shot at. I dove hard, pulled my saftey release and came down feet first on the head of one of the shooters while trying to kill the guy beside him with a well placed katana slash. Even with bonus dice, you can't pull off a 10 meter drop into hostile fire and attack in SR without taking some damage, though ;)

The statements I made were about someone who rollplays exclusively vs. someone who roleplays exclusively. The best place to be is somewhere in the middle of the two.

Toturi, I said "invested". He was definitely interested in playing Bob the Destroyer. He wasn't invested in his character, at all, though. It was just a faceless set of numbers to him.

[Shockwave_IIc]

The bonus i give for a "good descriptive scene" is either extra dice or a reroll if the dice turn up real bad. If they are rolling 6 dice and get say 4 success then all good, roll only 1 or none after the cool description 'ave a reroll.